The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Some networking applications require switching between a high number of ports. For example, a typical data center includes a large number of servers, and switches to communicatively couple the servers to outside network connections, such as backbone network links. As another example, a high-volume website server system can include a large number of web servers, and switches to communicatively couple the web servers to backbone network links.
In some switching applications, to increase system bandwidth, multiple hardware components are used to process network traffic in parallel in a single modular switching system. In such applications, it is important to direct traffic through the various components of the switch in an efficient manner.